Estonia Renounces Rule By Moscow

Republic Seeks To Avoid Plight Of Lithuania

MOSCOW — The Soviet republic of Estonia, proclaiming the restoration of independence is under way, renounced Moscow`s authority in its territory Friday and began the transition to statehood.

The Estonian parliament announced a legalistic, step-by-step approach to independence in hopes of avoiding the kind of confrontation with Moscow that its Baltic neighbor, Lithuania, faces.

President Bush sent a personal note to Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev on Friday supporting Lithuanian self-determination and urging a peaceful solution to the secessionist crisis there.

``I do not want to risk misunderstanding by failing to communicate,``

Bush told reporters. ``I want to be sure that the Soviets understand our position-and understand that we`re not trying to make things difficult for Lithuania or the Soviet Union or anyone else.`` he said.

But Bush`s note arrived just as Moscow moved to assert its authority by firing Lithuania`s acting prosecutor, Arturas Paulauskas, after he refused to enforce Moscow`s deadline for seizing firearms from citizens.

The staff of the prosecutor`s office refused to comply with the eviction order, and Soviet troops occupied the building in the capital of Vilnius late Friday, according to a spokesman for the Sajudis independence movement.

And early Saturday, uniformed men also moved into Lithuania`s central newspaper printing plant. They refused to identify themselves and said only that they were protecting the building. Witnesses said they saw at least seven men armed with night sticks.

While the increasingly serious Baltic independence movement is a high-visibility challenge to the Soviet leadership, it was only part of a wave of ethnic and economic tension sweeping the nation from border to border.

- In the bleak western Siberian oil fields near Tyumen, which provide up to 65 percent of the Soviet Union`s petroleum supplies, workers have threatened to strike over living conditions. The walkout, which could cut the Soviet Union`s critical hard-currency export earnings in half, had been set to begin Sunday but was postponed for one week after Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov intervened.

- Ethnic disputes between the southern Soviet republics of Armenia and Azerbaijan ``are increasingly disquieting,`` the official Tass news agency said in reporting fierce gun battles between Interior Ministry troops and 6,000 Azeri vigilantes they found operating out of six headquarters.

Delegates to the new Estonian parliament meeting Friday in Tallinn, the capital, passed a bill that ``proclaimed the beginning of restoration of the Estonian republic,`` Tass said.

All three Baltic republics, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, were forcibly annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940 under a secret protocol, a fact reflected in the bill`s language:

``The Estonian parliament denies the legitimacy of the state power of the USSR in Estonia from the moment the Soviet system of government was established here.``

A ``transitional period,`` expected to be six months or a year, was announced for the ``formation of the Estonian republic`s constitutional agencies of state power.``

Promises were made to ``ensure legal guarantees for all inhabitants of Estonia, regardless of their nationality`` while an interim government is seated to manage the republic`s affairs.

Of the parliament`s 105 members, 73 voted for the bill while three abstained.

The three who abstained and the 29 who boycotted the vote represent Russian and other non-Estonian nationalities living in the republic, according to a spokesman for Estonia`s pro-independence Popular Front.

Debate was lengthy and contained angry exchanges over possible retribution by Gorbachev and even the prospect of civil war, the spokesman said.

Ethnic Russians in the parliament condemned the bill and a supplemental resolution as discriminatory.

The parliament elected Arnold Ruutel as president. He told reporters in Tallinn that he was confident that talks on Estonian independence would begin soon with a representative of the central government in Moscow.

Gorbachev repeatedly has said that all 15 of the union republics have the right to secede, but must await passage of a new law delineating the process and economic responsibilities of those wishing to reject membership in the Soviet Union.

When the Estonian parliament goes back into session Monday, a bill will be presented formally asserting independence and condemning any attempts by the Kremlin to use force in propelling the republic back into the union, the Popular Front spokesman said.

As serious as the Baltic independence movement is, it does not have nearly the immediate economic threat that the Kremlin would face in a strike by oil field workers.